When social media manager Kiley Leff began to book vendors for her multi-day wedding in Antigua, she ticked off the traditional boxes: florist, band, videographer, photographer and so on. But she also added one that previous generations had never thought to request: a wedding content creator.
The job description of a wedding content creator? Someone to take candid iPhone photos—and videos—of her, her fiancée, and their 80 guests that they could post on social media. “I love the idea of things that just don’t look too hyper-polished. On your wedding day, you want people to really think and believe and see that this wasn’t all just super-fake or embellished,” Leff says.
While scrolling on Instagram, she found just the people: Alexandra O’Connor and Lois Bellamy, founders of the bridal social media firm Content for Brides.
O’Connor and Bellamy, two former brand social media editors, founded Content for Brides in 2023 over lunch at Shoreditch House in London. Their idea came from both an anecdotal hunch—many of their friends asked them to take fly-on-the-wall iPhone footage during their weddings—and a keen understanding of statistical trends: 76% of U.S. adults aged between 18 and 29 are active on Instagram and 59% are active on TikTok, according to the Pew Center. They’re used to sharing even the most mundane aspects of their lives, and observing the lives of others, through their phones. Of course they want to post about their wedding days.
And here’s the thing: The aesthetic that reigns supreme on smartphones isn’t high-resolution portraiture or stylized video. It’s candid (or candid-seeming) handheld content. While a professional photographer delivers posed formal portraits meant to be framed for a lifetime—Gen-Z and Millennial brides, O’Connor and Bellamy figured, might want to view their wedding through a more off-the-cuff, lo-fi lens. “I saw this disconnect in real life of brides really missing that instant, authentic, shareable content,” O’Connor says. Then, there were just the memories themselves: While generations prior kept everything in photo albums, many today store them on iPhones or in iClouds.
Two years later, business is booming. Nearly every weekend from May to October (the warm-weather stretch that’s colloquially known in the Western Hemisphere as “wedding season”) O’Connor and Bellamy are booked, whether it be for a London civil ceremony or a blowout bash in Portugal. When I speak to them over Zoom, Bellamy has just come back from a four-day wedding at a castle in Ireland, and is days away from flying to Croatia. O’Connor, meanwhile, is off to Ibiza and then the South of France soon after.
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